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Harper Lee Letters Fail to Sell at Auctionhttp://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/harper-lee-letters-fail-to-sell-at-auction/
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/harper-lee-letters-fail-to-sell-at-auction/#respondFri, 12 Jun 2015 19:46:21 +0000http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/harper-lee-letters-fail-to-sell-at-auction/A collection of Harper Lee’s private letters failed to sell at auction at Christie’s on Friday. The six letters, which were written between 1956 and 1961 or were undated, were estimated to be worth between $150,000 and $250,000. The bidding opened at $80,000 and stopped at $90,000.

The archive, which was open to the public at Christie’s before the sale, offered a rare glimpse into Ms. Lee’s private life during the period during which she was working on “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Go Set a Watchman,” the novel that preceded “Mockingbird.”

In the letters, which she wrote to a close friend, the New York architect Harold Caufield, she describes her conflicted feelings about her hometown (“Five months of a sort of ecclesiastical gloom that is Monroeville at present is really too much”) and her creative struggles.

The auction seemed ideally timed, just about a month ahead of the much-hyped publication of Ms. Lee’s novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” which she wrote before “Mockingbird.” Very little of Ms. Lee’s correspondence has gone to auction.

A spokeswoman for Christie’s said that the letters might be put up for auction again at a later date, or they could remain with the seller, Paul Kennerson, a book collector and Harper Lee fan.

Other rare manuscripts that went to auction today included an 1845 first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven and Other Poems,” which sold for $221,000, and a single leaf from the first edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” which sold for $6,875. It also included a 1914 letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his friend and colleague, the physicist Wilhelm Wien, expressing his excitement over his general theory of relativity, which sold for $37,500. “Now the Theory of Relativity really is extended to arbitrarily moving systems,” he wrote.